Customer contacts of a business enterprise can take various forms, and be for substantially any reason. Such contacts with the business enterprise may be in the form of face-to-face interactions at a premises for the enterprise, a telephony contact for interaction with enterprise resources (e.g., customer contact personnel, automated processes, or some combination thereof), interactive on-line sessions such as Internet chat sessions via an enterprise website, email, facsimile, etc. Moreover, when a customer contacts such an enterprise, the customer may have only a vague understanding of what the customer desires, and/or the customer may not know what enterprise tasks must be performed to fulfill each of the customer's requests. Accordingly, it frequently occurs that upon determining the requests and the enterprise tasks that must be performed to satisfy the requests of the customer, different enterprise resources are required (or best suited) to process different collections of the tasks. For example, a customer may contact the contact center to do more than one transaction (e.g., open a checking account and apply for a loan), with each transaction being performed by a different resource. In general, such requests and/or tasks are scheduled sequentially; that is, a first request or task is assigned to a first enterprise resource for completion, and once the first request or task is completed, a second request or task is entered into a queue (or other data structure) for assignment to a second enterprise resource or transferred directly to the second resource, and once the second request or task is completed by the second enterprise resource, a third request or task is entered into another queue (or other data structure) for assignment to a third enterprise resource or transferred directly to the third resource, etc. In fact, most contact centers assign tasks to contact center personnel (e.g., agents or other resources) in this fashion.
Such scheduling of customer requests and/or tasks is inefficient and/or problematic for both the customer and the enterprise for a number of reasons.
First, this type of scheduling can lead to work duplication and/or unnecessary use of enterprise resources. For example, a multi-skilled agent may be able to service multiple requests and/or tasks simultaneously. By queuing the requests and/or tasks sequentially, the ability to use such a multi-skilled agent to service multiple requests and/or tasks is frequently unrecognized by the contact center routing algorithm. If the allocation of enterprise resources is performed request-by-request, then neither the customer nor the resource may have sufficient information when performing a first of the enterprise requests and/or tasks to also perform a second of the requests and/or tasks. Thus, to complete the second request and/or task, the customer is likely to have to wait for this second corresponding task to be reassigned to the resource (or its equivalent). For example, requesting to exchange of a product for a different product, and requesting to purchase a service plan on a second product. The exchange likely entails the tasks of: (a) determining the appropriateness of the exchange, (b) arranging for the return of the product the customer currently has, and (c) providing the customer with information about alternative products. It may be that an agent from a first group of agents is able to handle (a) and (b), and an agent from a second group of agents is specifically trained for return product processing. Additionally, it may be that agents skilled in completing a service plan purchase are in a third group which can if necessary also handle customer requests for tasks of types (a) and (b). Accordingly, if tasks are scheduled sequentially in the order listed above, then the customer may likely be transferred to three different agents.
When a customer request(s) requires more than one enterprise resource to fulfill the request(s), then it is typical that a customer is only scheduled for interacting with a second resource once a customer interaction with a first enterprise resource has completed. Thus, even though a contact's associated request(s)/task(s) performed by each of the first and second resources may be independent of one another, the contact is only entered into only one queue (or other data structure) at a time for assignment to enterprise resources. Thus, the customer can experience substantial wait times between resources.
Some contact center product offerings allow a call to queue in multiple splits/skills but once a customer's call has been answered by one skill, the call is removed from all other queues. For example, if a customer needed to have three different requests handled, the customer would generally have to select one and then tell the answering agent about the additional needs. This often results in the customer being transferred to another agent, which is inefficient for the customer and the enterprise. Additionally, some product offerings support a workflow capability, which allows work to proceed through a number of tasks. This capability requires a predefined order for those tasks to occur in.
In general, there is no automated capability for uniformly expediting a customer contact having multiple requests or having one request that requires multiple skills for successful servicing, particularly when the collection of skills cannot be serviced by a single multi-skilled agent.